In wake of the public awareness over the dangers of cholesterol and high fat diets, there has been a trend to lowering the amount of fat in one's diet. However, despite this trend, people of all cultures and all ethnic groups enjoy and will continue to enjoy numerous varieties of pan-fried foods. The specific problem addressed by the present invention, and not satisfactorily addressed by the prior art, is a means for cooking low-fat or non-fat fried foods. More particularly, no current commercially available frying device allows the cook to simultaneously fry the food and drain the grease away from the food that is being cooked.
Several attempts have been made at designing a low-fat or fat-free frying pan. These designs normally constitute a single piece of cookware. The frying pan may include an upraised central portion with a grease reservoir surrounding the upraised central portion and disposed between the upraised central portion and the outer wall of the pan. Grooves, channels or grids may be provided to drain the grease from the upraised portion into the grease reservoir.
The above design scheme suffers from two common problems. First, the grease reservoir is not sufficiently isolated from the food. The pan is normally intended to be placed on top of an electric burner, the electric burner being disposed below the upraised central portion and the reservoir being disposed around the electric burner. Because of the close proximity between the reservoir and the burner, the grease becomes hot as it is collected in the reservoir and has a tendency to splatter upward on both the food and the cook. Second, there is no way to drain excess grease from the reservoir as it accumulates without interrupting the cooking operation. If the cook tilts the pan to pour the grease out of the reservoir while the food remains disposed on top of the upraised central portion, the cook risks losing some of the food or the cook may damage the food by attempting to firmly hold it in place with a spatula as the pan is tilted to pour out the excess grease.
Another approach to providing a low-fat frying device is to provide an insert for placement inside a conventional frying pan. The food is cooked on the insert and the grease drains off the insert or through the insert and is collected in the frying pan disposed below. Two problems are associated with this design scheme. First, the inserts are not removable and therefore the cook cannot easily lift the insert out of the pan during the cooking operation to drain excess grease from the pan. Second, the inserts do not effectively isolate the food from the grease and the hot grease disposed immediately below the insert splatters upward through the insert and on to the food. Most of the inserts are not designed to isolate the food from the splattering grease but merely serve as a means to facilitate the drainage of excess grease after the cooking operation is completed. This process is not considered to be a low-fat cooking scheme because the food remains coated with grease during the entire cooking operation.
Thus, there is a need for an improved frying pan insert and also for an improved combination frying pan/frying pan insert that allows for low-fat or even fat-free cooking. The insert should have an improved means for draining grease away from the food during the cooking operation and further an improved means for isolating the accumulated grease from the food. The insert should also be easily removed from the frying pan during cooking so that excess grease can be removed from the grease reservoir or reservoir without significantly interrupting the cooking operation. Finally, there is a need for a frying pan insert/frying pan combination that provides a safe and effective means for low-fat frying whereby the grease is separated and isolated from the frying food and further is not permitted to splatter upward back onto the food or toward the cook.